How Not To Do It

When I was in college and into my 30’s, I slept around a lot. It felt good to be wanted; it felt like something I needed. But sexual habits etch deeply. Once becomes twice into thrice and before I knew it the wires connecting my crotch and heart and thoughts dug deep and crisscrossed and again before I knew it, a knot of unfulfilling behavior was tied.

More often than not, I didn’t even feel pleasure after a certain point. Just numbness in a makeshift costume of consent. After we moved too quickly in a haze of booze and/or whatever relatively innocuous substance was on the table, moved too quickly through the preliminaries and I gave myself up to the habit and the in and out and the friction became more like aggravation than appreciation. Sometimes it hurt. Then it was mostly about just getting through it till one of my favorite parts happened, til he came in a frenzy of desire mistaken for love for me. Waiting for him to come so we could get back to laughing and talking together and I had my body and a friend back.

The indignities I mistook for friendship. My pussy swollen and unrecognizable from the pounding and my bewilderment and his indifference. “Yeah, that happens” he said. Later, I would learn that my smoker’s cough that punctuated that particular encounter was offputting to him that when he and a group of his buddies saw me the next week in a bar, he told the story of it, highlighting my bronchial issues and his repulsion.

Before that, in college town Oklahoma, I was at a house party. I knew a boy I had been sleeping with was around somewhere, and so I asked someone where he was. They pointed to a bedroom door and so I went in and found in the dark room a figure on the floor. I didn’t know better, I thought it was him, and of course it wasn’t and of course I discovered this as he was inside me. Too late. All too soon and too late to do anything about it except kick him out of me in a blue streak and leave immediately. Storm out, shuddering. But the act was the part that mattered. The act was the slice of my story that defined it and when I found the actual dude I was initially looking for and said, “I thought it was you”, it didn’t matter. He was hurt. He was mad. He was repulsed. I left town soon after. On to the next mistake. There are a hundred stories like this on a spectrum.

Truth has been distorted by profound and collective sexual fear and suffering. I affirm: promiscuity in women is a misguided search for love. Other people’s fears, fantasies, and delusional desires to the contrary are so loud now, are so part of the story of objectification and so-called sexual liberation that this sadness mounting is too soft and fragile for the myopic masses to contemplate. Whose pussy would open freely in this context? It’s wishful thinking gone mad. I weep in my body, in my heart always for what it has meant to be a human female in this time and place.